COVID19 and 'common sense'.

As COVID chaos begins to reign again, we brace ourselves for the shudder-inducing thought of a winter lockdown.

The contradictory nature of the government's recent advice makes this still-unfamiliar situation even more confusing. Groups of more than 6 are now banned. Unless, of course, these groups are found within schools, the interiors of pubs, shops or restaurants. The furore over the very recent Dettol advert which romanticised the 'second family' banter of commuting and office life now stands obsolete as the government U-turns on their 'return to work' rhetoric. After introducing its August 'eat out to help out' scheme, which explicitly encouraged people to eat inside restaurants rather than get food to take away, the Conservatives then branded people as irresponsible for eating and drinking out amid the recent surge in cases. If anything at all is obvious amongst all this, it's that no one, even those making the decisions, has a clue what's going on.

One only needs to google 'common sense COVID' to find a barrage of media headlines and government rhetoric earnestly advising this apparently simple solution. The trouble with advising common sense in our current situation is simply that no one has it any more. We are living through the worst global pandemic in living memory, and life as we know it has turned upside down. A 'common sense' of British social etiquette previously might have been to shake someone's hand upon meeting them. This is now a public health hazard.

I recoiled in horror the other day as a I saw people hugging each other in the street. But this physical closeness is part of how we, as humans, relate to each other. Can we blame anyone for physically urging things to go back to normal? To be able to be and feel close to our friends and family who occupy different households. I have found it so unnatural at times, hovering an awakward distance away from my close friends, talking a little bit louder and gesturing a bit more enthusiastically to make up for the physical gulf between our persons. Never in our lifetimes has it been common sense to stand 6 feet away from our loved ones.

By advising 'common sense', the government and mainstream media once again puts the onus on the individual for their behaviour in these still unfamiliar circumstances. Rather than provide a coherent set of guidelines and rules, and an infrastructure to make their execution accessible to all, they gesture towards this vague sense of an unwritten but universal code of conduct. In a volatile time characterised largely by its uncertainty, maybe we need to scrap the empty preaching of 'common sense', and begin to build up a more helpful set of learned behaviours. By putting this now out-of-date framework for communal behaviour to rest, we can begin to build a new one.